The war on children
The war on immigration that the United States is conducting along its southern border has become a war on children, and it is an assault on freedom, and on the humanity we hope will take us into the future.
As of June 15, 2018, the Department of Homeland Security reported that it had removed nearly 2,000 children from their parents, detained for illegal entry into the country. Subsequently, President Donald J. Trump, adding to the atrocity of his ongoing lie-telling, has lied along typically partisan lines about who issued the order for these separations, but there is a clear and bolded line from his April 2018 issuance of a zero-tolerance immigration policy to the thousands of young people now being kept from their caretakers.
The destruction is absolute in some cases. Consider the story of Marco Antonio Muñoz. Officials in Texas took his child from his arms and locked the father alone in a cell in Starr County. He killed himself in the hours that followed. Border patrol agents told The Washington Post that Muñoz “lost it.”
The United States now stands in a cesspool. We wade into a kind of filth we haven’t seen in our land since Executive Order 9066, and we are unfortunately taking our place in the history of centuries of children who have been subjected to the mitigation of agency, of recognition, of compassion, and, essentially, of a protection that any sane species would prioritize when it realizes that the newest generation of human beings is the one that must care for the oldest as it withers.
The planet-wide tragedy inflicted upon the world’s youngest inhabitants, a long story to which the United States is now writing a new chapter, includes children being made into soldiers, into prostitutes, and into prisoners. It is the story of children stripped by illness of their fathers and mothers and then left as unwitting heads of family after the diseases our politicians choose to ignore ruin their homes — there are 15 million AIDS orphans and counting, for example. It is the story of a people for whom state is no longer a guarantee, either. As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl notes, in her excellent and perhaps under-read book, Why Arendt Matters, which is a deep look at the writings and teachings of Hannah Arendt, who was one of our greater thinkers who never took her eye off totalitarianism — and it’s a book from which I’m cribbing most of these statistics and facts, by the way — UNICEF estimates that 50 million children are born annually into a stateless existence without legal identity. That’s more than all the people left stateless by World War II.
On top of the pain that comes with the actuality of these events is the agony of watching the outrage due go lukewarm on the table of outcry and opposition. Pressing young humans and their families into service of political ends is a below-the-fold story for many, and now maybe for the U.S. as well. Sure, the Democrats are tweeting about it. Even the President’s own party — including Speaker Paul D. Ryan — is presenting compromise immigration legislation meant, in part, to stop the child–family separations, but the President promises not to sign a compromise package. And we trundle on. Maybe some actor will make a speech while giving an award. We are living in a broadband era of numbness and normalization, of distraction and equivocal facts. Protest isn't dead, but it isn't running an eight-minute mile, either. The worst of the cause now gets the lion's share of the story, dressed like ninjas and throwing rocks, brawling with their maniac counterparts in the streets. Meanwhile, other agents of change quietly gerrymander us right out of our own elections. We are learning to accept it.
Children are at the center of it, at the border. The phenomenon of their plight is global but the phenomenon in places such as Starr County, as it is everywhere, is about what the powerful do to children, and why, and how suffering children fit into the playbooks of political goals and ends. It is about demoralizing, denaturing, and disempowering individuals by threatening their families and dividing individuals from the structures that keep them strong. It is about scaring voters into accepting policies, ideologies, and enforcements — present-day and others to come — with a modicum of proffered cruelty serving as a propped-up stopgap against supposed threats. These families threaten the weak, we have been told. Are we the weak? It is after all, “the weak” that Attorney General Jeff Sessions says he is protecting by enthusiastically (and religiously) telling his country to shut up and accept this fresh brand of Trumpian savagery, to accept the taking of children from their parents and housing them in hollowed-out Walmarts. Perhaps we are weak; perhaps it's not these immigrant families that are the threat, however.
Our nation’s promise is weakened by this new betrayal, which is a betrayal of its rich and honorable immigration history and a betrayal of its citizens, who've been able in the past to count themselves as an honorable people. Furthermore, the United States’ current policies and actions toward families and children along the border puts its behavior increasingly inline with that of incipient totalitarianism — of which the assault upon the families of those the ruler seeks to suppress is one of Arendt’s primary identifying pillars — and which is, as Young-Bruehl reminds us, a creeping brand of horror that knows no borders in the end.